Need Help Explaining Game Balance Logic to People

[Username17]

If you hate axe rushes, it's pretty easy to mod civ so that axes are less powerful. It's an interesting game balance exercise: what's the smallest change you can make so that axe rushing isn't as overwhelming without messing the early game up in other ways.

Problem: without the Axe Rush, there's no meaningful combat gains to b had at all before the invention of the Rifle.

-Username17

[MartinHarper]

I've had good experiences waging war with Trebuchet. The supporting troops can be anything, but Elephants, Macemen, Musketmen, and Knights all work. Weakening axes would make attacking with swords more effective.

[name_here]

You know, it's probably because i am a wuss and play Civ4 in wuss mode, but i'm a bit lost on what is so magical about axemen and riflemen.

It's not as blatently obvious as the importance of being the attacker in alpha centauri, for instance.

[shau]

You know, it's probably because i am a wuss and play Civ4 in wuss mode, but i'm a bit lost on what is so magical about axemen and riflemen.

It's not as blatently obvious as the importance of being the attacker in alpha centauri, for instance.

On this note, I haven't played any of the civ games, so I have no idea why you can't effectively kill other people without the aid of axes or rifles. I thought this was the series in which you can fend off a panzer assault with a squad of Greek hoplites.

[name_here]

you can do that. It doesn't happen often, though.

Actually, I can guess why for axemen. In the very early game they've got a major jump in power as compared to previous units, so you can manage to easily overwhelm other civs before they have many or any axemen.

I'm not nearly so clear on riflemen, but i guess it has to do with them bypassing a stupidly large number of defense bonuses by virtue of being gunpowder units. Don't know why it's not Grenadiers, though.

[MartinHarper]

Actually, I can guess why for axemen. In the very early game they've got a major jump in power as compared to previous units, so you can manage to easily overwhelm other civs before they have many or any axemen.

Also, they have a prerequisite resource. If you pick on a civ without that resource, or pillage the resource, you can ensure that they have no axemen to defend. Also, they can get city-attacker and cover (anti-archer) promotions. Finally, they come with the same technology as slavery, which gives you a production boost at the same time.

[Doom]

Yep, it's a good jump in power, AND you can deny your opponent the jump, with the only 'counter' being chariots--yet another piece that your opponent might not have the resources to build.

Knights are also a big jump, but by the time you get them, your opponent will likely have either spears (bad counter), halberds (good counter), elephants (good counter), or, simply archers behind walls.

Musketmen don't have the strength of knights, so can't really do it unless you have a good size army...the time it takes to build that army, and you could get riflemen (strong enough to beat anything the other guy has), and, hey look, we've just gone through all of BC and a good chunk of AD. I really wish there was a way to spend at least 50 more turns between 1000BC and 1000AD, without messing up everything else.

[Prak]

Have you tried setting up an AI match between humans and orcs to see who wins?

Well, you could point out that in actual Civ 4, a civ is never denied a unit in exchange for a unique, their unique is a slightly better (even if only conditionally) version of a standard unit.

Except for Dog Soldiers, which are worse than Axemen.

Huh, didn't know that. I've never done an across the board examination of unique units, I'm a pretty casual civ player.

[name_here]

huh, i just looked them up, and they are in fact worse than Axemen in every possible situation that will or even can arise.

EDIT: wait, no, they're slightly better sometimes. misread the axeman strength thingy.

[Parthenon]

Back to the original question, I'm trying to work out what Bill wanted. I think he's trying to say that it isn't balanced to have Orcs have a more limited variety of units, but have a lot more of them and some be a bit better, whereas Humans have the wider variety.

I can't see anything inherently broken in that. Since this is a game where various units are good as counters to others, as long as Orcs still get at least soft counters to everything then they can still be effective.

It would be like in D&D if you swapped the levels at which Sorcerors and Wizards learnt new levels of spells around: Sorcerors would then be slightly more powerful and have more spells per day but be a lot more limited, whereas Wizards would get a lot more options but get access to those options a level later.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Back to the original question, I'm trying to work out what Bill wanted. I think he's trying to say that it isn't balanced to have Orcs have a more limited variety of units, but have a lot more of them and some be a bit better, whereas Humans have the wider variety.

I can't see anything inherently broken in that. Since this is a game where various units are good as counters to others, as long as Orcs still get at least soft counters to everything then they can still be effective.

It would be like in D&D if you swapped the levels at which Sorcerors and Wizards learnt new levels of spells around: Sorcerors would then be slightly more powerful and have more spells per day but be a lot more limited, whereas Wizards would get a lot more options but get access to those options a level later.

Keep in mind that this is a mod with nearly entirely different units and abilities. There are really no counters (in general). I mean if you're the Infernal Civilization there are a bunch of BS abilities that hurt Demons specifically, or if you build undead units there are some BS abilities that hurt Undead specifically. But there's really no strict counter to units in the game except for Horse Archers against Archers, and Orcs can't build Horse Archers.

[name_here]

I'm still a bit lost on the problem here. Do you have a manual in PDF or somthing? Are archers really so ungodly powerful they can only be countered by horse archers?

[RandomCasualty2]

Keep in mind that this is a mod with nearly entirely different units and abilities. There are really no counters (in general).

That generally makes a strategy game pretty much unsalvageable.

[Parthenon]

So wait, what is the difference between the units then if they aren't better or worse against one another? Just damage, movement and resources?

If so, thats a bit simple for a strategy game.

[shadzar]

If you can ever figure out how to explain balance to anyone in gaming, then let me know.

I have tried even explaining to Peter LEe, that when making things you cannot use the Magic the Gathering approach.

While I understand your concept, not the game; I think MtG is a good source for the wrong way to balance things.

Not having read all post, but addressing the opening post...

MtG had the cards made, and then tweaked to see how they would work based on ability and cost. Trial and error, is the method used. There is really little quantifiable within this system to truly balance anything.

Likewise the failed DDM game was created the same way. The components were just made up and tweaked to see what would work, and add when something was too powerful tot he cost, or take away when weak, or take away power to meet the cost, or add power to meet the cost.

It doesn't really work for either of those games, or any other piecemeal game, including RPGs, and any game where you "build" the game.

My preferred edition of D&D is AD&D 2nd. Within the confines of it, there are many systems working together to keep some structure to the game. Many don't like the systems, but they work. Humans can do anything and gain any level, while other races can only reach a certain level and do less. This balances the game form the world perspective.

Not to go too deeply into 2nd, but to just touch for an example, your game seems (still haven't yet followed the link) similar to all these. Races have varying factors that strive to balance the game.

Why can orcs not have muskermen?

Humans get:
Musketmen
Horsemen

Orcs get:
Horsemen

Quantifying them the humans and orcs are in no way balanced. There are obviously much more going on than just these things, but a problem in game balance I have always seen is counting chits.

Counting chits would work like this:
Orcs get an attack bonus.
Humans get firearms.



That is one for orcs, and one for humans. The problem is they don't equate, unless the firearms are weaker than the name would imply. You need to balance out all things. There is always something hidden that balances out one thing with another, but sometimes they don't quite seem to balance, and you would need the designers notes to figure out what is supposed to balance each thing out, once the stick figures start growing into the humans and orcs.

You have to look at the whole of the humans and orcs, and tribes to see where they began and what was added or taken away to see what was balanced. On the surface many things may look balanced or broken, and might be the opposite of what you think.

Balance is tricky, and goes beyond the surface. That is the best I can offer without knowing a LOT more about the specific game.

I hope this general look is able in some way to help.

[RandomCasualty2]

My preferred edition of D&D is AD&D 2nd. Within the confines of it, there are many systems working together to keep some structure to the game. Many don't like the systems, but they work. Humans can do anything and gain any level, while other races can only reach a certain level and do less. This balances the game form the world perspective.

That was a terrible balance paradigm. It was basically something where you'd gamble that the game wouldn't get to high level, so you'd be an elf and get all those bonuses over your human partymate. If the game did get to high level, you were fucked though, because you literally couldn't gain any levels and just got locked.

But most of the time you never got that high, and the people playing elves just got shit for free. And if you ever wanted to run a high level game, then everyone would pick a human.

The 1E/2E racial balance model was total ass.

[Username17]

Several obvious things exist in Civ IV allowing for a transformation into MoMII. The most obvious is the “Religions” mechanic, that allows a city to be tagged with a special marker that allows it to build different buildings and units. These Religions are of course going to be replaced wholesale with “races” - as such a city can indeed be multiracial containing both Elves and Beastmen. Such a city can build Elven archers and dire wolf riders.

But having played around a bit with the Rise of Mankind mod, I have noticed that the game gets... sticky... if you add to many civics or religions. The maximum you could sustain would be 8 races, and one less would be better. Which is less than MoM. I propose that Dark Elves and Elves don't really need to be separate races, and “Barbarians” don't have to be different from humans. My list would be:

• Humans
• Elves
• Orcs
• Beast Men
• Halflings
• Lizardfolk
• Dwarves

And yes, for those playing at home, I would intend for War Trolls to be buildable units for the Orcs and Doom Drakes to be buildable for the Lizardfolk. Making an “Orc Settler” unit that allows you to make a city that comes with the Orc race is easy enough.

Anyhow, the biggest difficulty you're going to look at would be the magic itself. The “Spell Books” system is easy and fun – just give players non-reasearchable technologies at the beginning that are prereqs for the magic in their spheres. But you're not going to be able to cast magic “yourself” in quite the same way. There are a couple of workarounds available.

Your “mana” itself is just Spy Points. Research is Research (but only gives “magic” not shit like “iron working”), Gold is gold (but your gold rate is called “Alchemy”), and Culture can I guess just work like that (it's called “Dominion” if you care). The Spy units are gone and you now have magical heroes that have actions that cost mana that do things. As you research more spells, you get more things your wizards can do. Not wholly satisfactory, but it'll mostly have to do as I see it. The other thing you can do is have units that accumulate zero production from resources or food that you can “hurry” for mana. Not sure if that would break the AI, so you might have to allow people to make hell hounds out of iron mines somehow.

But the thing that I kept running into is that while this could all be done, it's kind of a lot of work, and the entire system of how units fight an siege units fit on top of that is just really dumb. Having your catapults charge and take the brute force of the defending army while your infantry stays in reserve is fucking retarded, the bombardment system of Alpha Centauri is ridiculously better. And I think it came out over 10 years ago now. The unit creation methodology is just incredibly baroque, since you can't just make a couple of sprites and be done with it. It's a whole set of 3d crap with a bunch of animation I don't care about. It makes the barrier to creation unnecessarily high.

Frankly, no one gives a fuck about the corps until the game is basically over, so I don't see just removing them as a problem. The civics are going to be the overland enchantments by and large. You research them up and then cast them instead of Revolutions. They can just go ahead and be big.

So your starting character might have two “Spell Book” techs as well as some starting units that would happen to be of an appropriate race. You can also have some character powers. If you're Rjak, you get a Death Book and a Chaos Book. You also have Dark Power that gives you a dominion rate and makes Temples cheaper. And you start with some Orcish Warriors and an Orcish Settler. If you're Kali instead you get a Death Book and a Sorcery Book, you also have Artficer that gives a free upgrade to your hero units and makes your alchemist guilds cheaper. And you start with some Elvish Scouts and an Elvish Settler.

Like I said earlier, the concepting was done up in a totally plausible fashion, I just found that I didn't care enough to do it.

-Username17

[shadzar]

My preferred edition of D&D is AD&D 2nd. Within the confines of it, there are many systems working together to keep some structure to the game. Many don't like the systems, but they work. Humans can do anything and gain any level, while other races can only reach a certain level and do less. This balances the game form the world perspective.

That was a terrible balance paradigm. It was basically something where you'd gamble that the game wouldn't get to high level, so you'd be an elf and get all those bonuses over your human partymate. If the game did get to high level, you were fucked though, because you literally couldn't gain any levels and just got locked.

But most of the time you never got that high, and the people playing elves just got shit for free. And if you ever wanted to run a high level game, then everyone would pick a human.

The 1E/2E racial balance model was total ass.

So as to not completely derail this one, I will join in a discussion about 2nd in a new thread and expound on my ideas of why it is what it is if you wish to start one.

In a nutshell it was not needing to balance the elf and human for the party, because there shouldn't be competition between those within the party, but to make the world so that elves hadn't overrun it a long time ago. So while the world was balanced the players lost a bit to not have 1000 year old level 275 elf wizards running around as its overlords.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

Several obvious things exist in Civ IV allowing for a transformation into MoMII. The most obvious is the “Religions” mechanic, that allows a city to be tagged with a special marker that allows it to build different buildings and units. These Religions are of course going to be replaced wholesale with “races” - as such a city can indeed be multiracial containing both Elves and Beastmen. Such a city can build Elven archers and dire wolf riders.

But having played around a bit with the Rise of Mankind mod, I have noticed that the game gets... sticky... if you add to many civics or religions. The maximum you could sustain would be 8 races, and one less would be better. Which is less than MoM. I propose that Dark Elves and Elves don't really need to be separate races, and “Barbarians” don't have to be different from humans. My list would be:

• Humans
• Elves
• Orcs
• Beast Men
• Halflings
• Lizardfolk
• Dwarves

And yes, for those playing at home, I would intend for War Trolls to be buildable units for the Orcs and Doom Drakes to be buildable for the Lizardfolk. Making an “Orc Settler” unit that allows you to make a city that comes with the Orc race is easy enough.

Anyhow, the biggest difficulty you're going to look at would be the magic itself. The “Spell Books” system is easy and fun – just give players non-reasearchable technologies at the beginning that are prereqs for the magic in their spheres. But you're not going to be able to cast magic “yourself” in quite the same way. There are a couple of workarounds available.

Your “mana” itself is just Spy Points. Research is Research (but only gives “magic” not shit like “iron working”), Gold is gold (but your gold rate is called “Alchemy”), and Culture can I guess just work like that (it's called “Dominion” if you care). The Spy units are gone and you now have magical heroes that have actions that cost mana that do things. As you research more spells, you get more things your wizards can do. Not wholly satisfactory, but it'll mostly have to do as I see it. The other thing you can do is have units that accumulate zero production from resources or food that you can “hurry” for mana. Not sure if that would break the AI, so you might have to allow people to make hell hounds out of iron mines somehow.

But the thing that I kept running into is that while this could all be done, it's kind of a lot of work, and the entire system of how units fight an siege units fit on top of that is just really dumb. Having your catapults charge and take the brute force of the defending army while your infantry stays in reserve is fucking retarded, the bombardment system of Alpha Centauri is ridiculously better. And I think it came out over 10 years ago now. The unit creation methodology is just incredibly baroque, since you can't just make a couple of sprites and be done with it. It's a whole set of 3d crap with a bunch of animation I don't care about. It makes the barrier to creation unnecessarily high.

Frankly, no one gives a fuck about the corps until the game is basically over, so I don't see just removing them as a problem. The civics are going to be the overland enchantments by and large. You research them up and then cast them instead of Revolutions. They can just go ahead and be big.

So your starting character might have two “Spell Book” techs as well as some starting units that would happen to be of an appropriate race. You can also have some character powers. If you're Rjak, you get a Death Book and a Chaos Book. You also have Dark Power that gives you a dominion rate and makes Temples cheaper. And you start with some Orcish Warriors and an Orcish Settler. If you're Kali instead you get a Death Book and a Sorcery Book, you also have Artficer that gives a free upgrade to your hero units and makes your alchemist guilds cheaper. And you start with some Elvish Scouts and an Elvish Settler.

Like I said earlier, the concepting was done up in a totally plausible fashion, I just found that I didn't care enough to do it.

-Username17

Interesting how some of my ideas are similar to yours. I hadn't thought of converting Espionage to a worldwide mana system that all Mages from your civilization draw upon. I had considered FFH's current implementation, casting a spell is the same as attacking, or having mana points individually for each mage. Higher level techs give more powerful spells which subsequently cost more mana, and the lower level mages wouldn't be able to cast them until they got some xp.

If I did a mod, I would not plan on including seige units. Mages and their spells would fill in that function. Never played Alpha Centauri so I'm curious how their bombardment system works.

Yeah making a mod would take a lot of work and you'd have to care enough to do it. Regarding the graphics and the units though, fortunately FFH and Warhammer mod already have a lot of units made for fantasy races so most units in a fantasy mod could be taken care of. And even the wrong graphics would still work anyway. And, if the mod was good enough and popular enough, you can be sure that some volunteers for the 3d modeling would pop up.

Peace,
Bill

[Username17]

dp

[Username17]

I haven't looked at how the Warhammer or FfH mods are progressing for some time, but you're right that there is a great deal of ground covered unit-wise by those things. I imagine that you could plunder those things for a lot of the stuff you'd want to use one way or another. Not really sure how the copyrights work on that though.

There are a number of things about MoMmod that would be easy once you wrap your head around them. For example, both building Culture and setting a Culture Rate would be unlocked by what is effectively Future Tech – the Spell of Mastery. You could even put in the differences between the High Elves and the Dark Elves by putting magic requirements in addition to race requirements on certain units. That is, if you have an Elven City and you have Death Magic you can have it build Night Blades if you have the right buildings.

One thing that I really butted my head against is Resources. The way Civ IV handles resources is really dumb and ends up making the entire game something of a cluster fuck because the starting resources of your starting area are so random. It makes the entire thing not very good as a game because your strategy isn't nearly as important as the pre-start random elements. That can be addressed somewhat by having resources be incredibly common. And once you start adding in all the crazy shit like lemons and chickens that people have modded in for various mods, it's not like it would get that repetitious. However, we're still at the point where once you have Adamantine somewhere in your empire you're going to be beating holy fuck out of everything because your whole army from everywhere is going to Adamantium Armed Paladins instead of the normal ones that other fuckers are stuck with.

What I would like is for the production resources to go to the city they are next to and only get shipped off to other cities if a city has 2 or more.

While I am at it, I fucking hate the CivIV food system where if you don't have Rice resources you can fuck off, because apparently your people are too stupid to figure out agricultural secrets like “planting shit somewhere else you dumb paste eaters.” I would prefer a system like Master of Magic's in which it was essentially your city's Health values that generated population growth. I mean shit, Health is basically meaningless in Civ IV, which is a damn shame. Using Food surpluses to make and/or feed troops would be ideal of course, but I am not sure how to do that off the top of my head.

Anyway, the core of any strategy game is what people have been calling “counters” in this thread. That is, if there is a “best” strategy, the game becomes completely uninteresting, no matter how many colorful flashes it throws around. Some of this needs to be at the unit level, having everyone make 10 axemen because “they are the best” is frustrating and dull. The future war, in which people build “infantry” is even worse. At any level of industrialization, there should be multiple things that you'd be interested in doing, depending on your opponent's stuff. That means that since Civ only has a single strength value, that units need to have a lot of key words and a lot of conditional bonuses and penalties if they are to actually fill that set of criteria. The R-P-S of what beats what on the attack and the defense should be complicated enough that there is more than a single if-then statement about what you should be doing. Just off the top of my head, I would say that the minimum number of acceptable units that are appreciably different for a level of industrialization would be 5. More would be preferable.

So you'd have several categories, and as you added more buildings (and in later cases, unlocked specific resources and the like), you'd advance one of more of them. Preferably in a non-linear fashion. Deadlock was completely ruined by the fact that you could get the highest tech planes off the top of the research building tree. You wouldn't want it to be that the building that allows you to make the pikemen leads to the building that gives you Nightblades.

Basically, you want fast nasty animals that will cut down archers but be driven off by spears. And you want spears that hold off beasts but get chewed up by archers. That's the minimum RPS system, and it's pretty much solved by building any two units and sending them out in stacks. So honestly, you want it to be more convoluted than that. Halberdiers that hack up spearmen or cav. Phalanxes that do well against archers or cav. Off hand, I'd want to set up a relatively long list of tags:

• Light Armor (most archery units get a bonus against lightly armored foes)
• Heavy Armor (Illusions and Doom Bolts get a bonus against heavy armored foes)
• Archery
• Cavalry
• Beast (Fire and Fear stuff gets a bonus against you, as do spears)
• Giant (Giants are only one monster, so “single target” stuff like Ballistae and mind blasts get a bonus)
• Construct (gets a huge bonus against psychic and illusionary stuff)
• Poison (Undead and Constructs get a bonus against you)
• Skirmisher (Explosive attacks like firebreath get a penalty against you)
• Lucky (Bonus against magic)
  And so on.

So your basic Orc Warrior is a dude with an Axe. He's a Light Armored Skirmisher. He can be gunned down easily by basic archers but he does very well against Hell Hounds. Your basic Halfling Militia is a bunch of hobbits with spears. They get a bonus against Cavalry and Beast enemies. They are Light Armored Lucky troops. They gt chewed up by archers and hold their own against Necromancy. And yeah, the basic Orc Warrior probably has a bigger base number than the Hobbit Militia, so the early Orc rush is probably at an advantage against the Hobbit Rush.

Which goes to another complaint, which is that Civ IV pretty much just has one toggle: Attack Now or Attack Later? There aren't a lot of things to do as far as choices that meaningfully alter your strategy. The development curve needs to branch a lot more than it does in Civ. Some of that is because the game isn't pretending that give a fuck about developing a written set of musical scales. So while I think it is definitely a good plan to have different races have basic competency differences at the different levels of industrialization, it's also a good idea for both the magic and industrialization ends of the total war to be able to be bent towards wildly different goals and productions. Just because two players are both starting with Death Books doesn't mean that they should be flinging the same spells or summoning the same units. One player might have gone running up the necromancy route and gotten a bunch of soul drains and some powerful Incorporeal wraiths (incorporeal creatures get a huge bonus against foes who don't have the “magic” tag); another player might have gone the demonology route and taken a bunch of bonus spying and some big firebreathing pit beasts.

And to further add to my tirade on how Civ IV was an unnecessarily weak game, they really blew it with the unit veteran abilities. They really had promise, but the final analysis is that none of them make a difference that is really that big and they don't stack properly and so you end up pretty much taking the “Combat” bonuses over and over again and no one cares. The +10% combat things shouldn't exist. Being a generalist should not be an option. Or rather, it should come free with your Cheerios when you take any of the ones that give some sort of conditional benefit. So you take the one that makes you fight and move better in Forests? Congratulations, you also get +10% all the time. Take the one where you get a bonus fighting Archers? Congratulations, you also get +10% all the time. Veteran units should all have some sort of interesting thing to justify their existence.

But it occurs to me that I didn't answer your question about how bombarding things works in Alpha Centauri. Basically you get to bombard squares within 2 of yourself. And you do collateral damage or devastate improvements from there and you are totally safe unless there is a bombard unit there, in which case you'll go to an artillery duel. So if the targets want to not get shelled into suckitude and then have you roll over them with rovers and infantry, they have to sortie out of their cities and break your artillery. I think something similar can be arranged by “summoning” “missiles.”

But my big dream is have everything inflict collateral damage of some kind. Then have most Cavalry have a low strength but have a collateral damage max of 100%, so if the enemy army is weakened you can clean it up by sending in cavalry to hunt down stragglers. Something appeals to me about having dire wolves chase down frightened and broken footmen.

-Username17

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

I don't think the mods have copyrighted everything, and there is a general attitude that you're free to take whatever you want from other mods as long as you credit the original creators. The only thing you might run into is if you grabbed music that another mod asked permission for, but a problem is unlikely to occur though.

As far as resources go, I don't terribly like CivIV or FFH's resource system. When I'm playing a fantasy mod I don't want my dwarves worrying about farming, or finding out how my drow raise cattle. You get tongue in cheek moments when the Demon Lord Hyborem Threatens your Civilization "Bananas or Death!" If I was going to do a mod, I would remove all resources and instead add a mana font resource which added food and production and commerce. Through various spells the mana fonts could be converted into specific elemental bonuses like a Death Mana Font which spawned Ghouls or something. This would keep the civ system of wanting to settle in locations with good resources, while making the only resource places of magical power that can be used to fuel interesting mechanics.

Also, I would make it so that certain Races thrive on different Terrains. For example Humans would get 2 food, 2 hammers, 2 commerce on plains, Elves 2 food, 2 hammers, 2 commerce on forests, etc. while all other terrain for that resource would be 0. This means that Players don't need to worry how Lizardmen feed themselves, they just naturally thrive in swamps while other races would have no incentive to settle there.

I wouldn't have iron or mithril or adamantine as resources on the map. Civs could just get techs to aquire a resource, and having the resource would improve their weapons. Or just ditch the idea of needing a resource at all and just upgrade all units automatically.

Regarding food, in History of the Three Kingdoms mod, they made it so that by default making a unit (any unit) consumes food, thus excess food and hammers contributes to its building. Thus if you're making troops your city can't grow. It's very easy to make specific or all units consume food while they're building (like Settlers and Workers).

Regarding Civ4's health system. Currently the Health system is just another cap (in addition to happiness) to a city's population. When Playing FFH, I realized that if I'm playing a Necromancer, I'm really not interested in building granaries or aqueducts or infirmaries. Building those takes away the immersion for me so they wouldn't exist in my mod. Health would entirely or largely be ignored.

Regarding counters and str score. I absolutely agree. I feel that there is a large need to expand beyond Civ4s default system. More counters is definitely better.

Regarding Experience Promotions. FFH did improve veteran promotions. Combat 1 gives +20% bonus, and the units in the game do not differ that much in str. Tier 1: 3 Str: Tier 2: 4 Str: Tier 3: 5 or 6 Str Tier 14: 12 Str. And what can happen is that you have such a highly promoted unit that he starts taking cities by himself.

I'm sure your Collateral Damage idea could be implemented

You've obviously put a lot of thought into this for someone who doesn't want to do it. 8)

Peace,
Bill

[name_here]

Yeah, the way that bombardment works in alpha centauri is good.

Also, the way aircraft work in alpha centauri is also good. More games need to have aircraft work that way.

[Doom]

At the risk of further derailments, did anyone here play Age of Wonders/Shadow Magic? It's basically what MoM should have been, and is a fairly playable game.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I liked Age of Wonders 2 and 2.5. They were a bit slow and attack accuracy was too low for my taste, but they definitely do what they set out to do. The level editor is nice enough that I sometimes use it to set up macro-scale events or make maps for non-computer RPGs.